Close to the Bone

Shunpei Kim, the antihero of director Yoichi Sai's new film Blood and Bones , is one of the least endearing characters ever to grace a movie screen. Compulsively cruel, breathtakingly petty, he stalks through life in Osaka's Korean ghetto with his face locked in a snarl. He puts maggoty meat on his family's dinner table while gambling away his earnings, beats and rapes his estranged wife, and hurls his stepdaughter down a staircase. When a worker at his fish-cake factory begs for back pay, Kim responds by applying a hot coal to the man's cheek. After the business takes off, Kim invests...